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Even as dust storms rolled over Phoenix, fires ravaged Texas, tornadoes flattened towns like Goderich, Ont., and rivers flooded many regions, mentions of climate change in newspapers and on broadcast media in North America decreased substantially.

According to the Virginia-based news aggregator DailyClimate.org, coverage dropped by 20 per cent from 2010 and by more than 40 per cent from 2009.

Last year at least 7,140 journalists and opinion writers published some 19,000 stories on climate change, as opposed to more than 11,100 reporters who filed 32,400 stories in 2009.

“The decline was seen across almost all benchmarks measured by the news service: 20 per cent fewer reporters covered the issue in 2011 than in 2010, 20 per cent fewer outlets published stories, and the most prolific reporters on the climate change beat published 20 per cent fewer stories,” wrote editor Douglas Fischer, whose organization tracks both U.S. and Canadian media.

“Particularly noticeable was the silence from the nation’s editorial boards: in 2009, newspapers published 1,229 editorials on the topic. Last year, they published less than 580 — half as many, according to DailyClimate.org’s archives.”

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Canadian sources were not much better than U.S. outlets, says Andrew Weaver, Canada Research Chair in climate modelling and analysis at the University of Victoria.

Last month he completed his latest analysis of how often five Canadian metropolitan dailies mentioned “climate change” or “global warming.” As in the U.S., there’s been a precipitous drop since 2007.

“What happened in 2007, it was like the perfect storm,” he explains in a telephone interview. “You had the release of The Fourth Assessment Report of the International Panel on Climate Change. You had a lot of public engagement through Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. Throw in the Nobel Prize on top of both.

“After that we had these desperate attempts to discredit the science.

“First of all there’s a story that we’re all going to hell in hand basket. Then we have these stories, ‘Oh these climate scientists are all a bunch of crooks.’ Now they’re looking for a new angle on the story but there isn’t one. So there isn’t a story anymore.”

Indeed, after three straight annual celebrity-filled green issues, even Vanity Fair got bored with climate change. In 2009, the magazine spiked the edition.

“Media coverage really follows the so-called thought leaders, the political elite, the cultural elite, the Hollywood elite, and the issue hasn’t had that kind of high-level involvement recently,” DailyClimate.org’s Fischer told the Star. “Obama picked health care instead of climate change. We didn’t really have a leader in 2011.”

In an election year in the U.S., global warming is simply too hot a political potato, especially in a recession, when any talk of environmental regulation has business threatening further job cuts.

“The Obama administration has taken this stance that climate change is not a good issue to run on,” says Robert J. Brulle, a professor of sociology and environmental science at Philadelphia’s Drexel University.

He follows the network nightly news for mentions of climate change. “It’s not in politicians’ interest to talk about it because, to really deal with climate change, we really have to change the way we live, especially in America. Nobody wants to hear that.”

Meanwhile in Canada, not even the Alberta oilsands Keystone pipeline protests and our withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol at last month’s UN climate talks in Durban, South Africa have produced a bump in coverage.

“Partly it’s a feature of the typical news cycle, but it’s also a general, and quite dangerous, ‘climate fatigue’ that is spreading far and wide,” offers York University business ethics professor Andrew Crane, co-director of the Centre of Excellence in Responsible Business. “Keystone and Kyoto have kept climate issues in the news, but the facts about climate change have tended to be relegated behind the meatier news stories about political brinksmanship and raw national interests.

“And then you’ve got the deliberately distracting debates about ‘ethical oil’ from the tarsands which are aimed at getting people to focus on anything other than climate change. The recent banana boycott of Chiquita is one such example.”

Ironically, there have been tiny but steady upticks in the percentages of people who believe that climate change is a threat, and that it’s a result of human activity.

Last month, the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press reported that, while the number of Americans convinced that the Earth is really heating up have still not caught up with the 2007 peak of 77 per cent, they are climbing again, with 63 per cent stating that there is solid evidence for climate change.

Perhaps it’s the Internet keeping the issue alive.

Maxwell Boykoff, an assistant professor at the University of Colorado’s Center for Science and Technology Policy Research and author of the just-published Who Speaks for the Climate?, says that online news coverage of climate change is burgeoning.

“But traditional media that I track, it has really atrophied over the last few years. The days of Walter Cronkite are over. People are turning to alternative sources.”

Indeed, hits on the foundation-funded DailyClimate.org in 2011 were double that of 2010, rising to four million from two million.

“I don’t particularly blame the media — climate change in itself simply isn’t news any more — but they could work harder at finding an angle at putting climate issues at the forefront of our attention again,” says Crane. “The danger though is that ‘newsworthy’ often requires some kind of debate or criticism which ends up giving undue attention to climate deniers who have been discredited by now but still get air time in the interests of pseudo ‘balance.’ ”

Weaver is trying to take a more optimistic view.

“I think the next phase will be a bunch of good news stuff, solutions,” he says. “Like, ‘Hey we’ve got this solar power going here,’ or ‘Look at this wind power there.’

“Frankly I wish there was more of that because there is a lot of solutions out there but we’re just not focusing on them.”

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